The World Editors Forum, the World Newspaper Congress and Info Services Expo, to be held from 7 to 10 June in Beirut, Lebanon, are the global summit meetings of the world's press. The 2010 summit meetings of the world's press take place, for the first time, in an Arab nation.

More than 1,500 publishers, chief editors, CEOs, managing directors and other senior newspaper executives are expected in Beirut, which the New York Times recently called one of the world's most compelling tourist destinations.

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the free press is in various degrees controlled, oppressed, suspended, banned and censored, as publishers, editors and journalists are harassed, attacked, persecuted and imprisoned.

Lebanon is a shining exception in an otherwise dark regional tableau: its newspapers and electronic media are fully free and diverse and have achieved an impact and influence far beyond the borders of this small country.

The programme themes for World Newspaper Congress is:

The economic crisis from which the world now appears to be emerging has brought sharply into focus a number of key issues and questions facing newspapers today:

• Newspaper circulations in print, though still surging ahead in the developing world, continue to lose ground in the majority of developed nations
• With the fantastic explosion of alternative advertising channels, the commercial revenues of newspapers, which have taken such a blow in the crisis over the past eighteen months, may struggle to gain their pre-recession levels any time soon
• Digital advertising revenues, on which so many publishers placed great hope for a prosperous future, will not on any foreseeable time scale provide sufficient new revenues to fully replace the structural, let alone cyclical, loss in print advertising for the great majority of news enterprises
• The powerful new reach and new audiences gained by newspapers through their exploitation of new electronic platforms are no guarantee at all of new financial prosperity - unless effective new multi-media sales strategies are fully exploited
• Good, credible journalism of quality, which citizens need more than ever in an age of information 'garbage', does not come cheaply and must be adequately funded if newspapers are to maintain their vital role in society and democracy
• Investment and experimentation in the whole range of new information distribution channels are not optional, but a necessity if newspapers are to follow and satisfy the changing consumption behaviour of their readers
• The process of 're-engineering' and re-organising the newspaper company to create a sustainable future will need to continue and even accelerate
• The relative impact of new platforms, from a new generation of reading 'tablets' and other such devices, to the new 'smartphones', remains unclear and in many cases still largely a promise for content providers
• New wealth may be won around good content provided through the new platforms - essentially the Internet for the moment - but newspapers are as yet to get their fair share from producing it
• Paid online content models - the great debate of 2009 - will become an even more critical issue in 2010, as newspapers volubly contest the right of search engines and other aggregators to run off with the vast majority of the revenues available from web audiences and advertisers and governments get into the discussion, either to reinforce content copyright or to examine the taxation of online advertising

There is indeed no shortage of critical issues for the news business to examine and debate at the 2010 World Newspaper Congress, as publishers strive to identify and develop the New Business Model necessary to prosper against the background of all these challenges.